After spending some 4 days in a big “liberated zone” that was managed by self-appointed leaders who announced “direct democracy” loudly on a microphone but didn’t actually let people autonomously self-govern, much less truly self-organize, it was tender indeed to be at the smallish, intentional, and highly participatory start of an outdoor solidarity space on the grassy quad at UNC-Asheville today.

What struck me was the way it lead with care—not pushing people past where they were ready to go, but engaging in lots of conversation, sharing, listening, and hearing. Knowing when to ask for support from others. Collectively wrestling with questions and co-education.

That care was especially evident, though, in the first two actions: setting up a free food and first-aid area; and spending hours reverently and beautifully chalking out the names of too many Palestinians murdered in Gaza, honoring the dead.

Who knows what will come of this relatively tiny solidarity space being opened up in a relatively tiny town. Yet as one student noted, they’re skilling up for the long haul.

#EducatingOurselvesForFreedom
#FoodNotFascism
#CareNotCops
#MourningOurDead
#MendingTheWorld

Vigil for Aaron Bushnell
and the 30,000+ People Killed in Gaza
Sunday, March 3, 6:30 p.m.

Gather by the Craven Street Bridge on the Wilma Dykeman Greenway by the river in Asheville to share words and silence in remembrance. That’s the same, now-sacred spot that we held a Public Mourner’s Kaddish in the early days of the genocide against Palestinians, and more recently, a remembrance for Tortuguita on the one-year anniversary of their murder-by-cops in Weelaunee Forest.

We’ll set up a DIY altar and gather around it. Bring flowers, candles, art, banners, and other mementoes to add to it.

We’ll have a few printouts on hand of “Memories of Aaron Bushnell as Recounted by His Friends” for folks to read excerpts aloud, and hold space for sharing thoughts and feelings, other readings, and/or songs/music.

Come as you are; bring your full self. And wear a mask for the collective care of all.

— self-organized by some AVL anarchists,
in love and rage 🖤💔🪬🍉🔥

#ArtOfRemembrance
#ArtOfResistance
#MourningOurDead
#FightingForTheLiving
#MendingTheWorld
#UntilAllAreFree

Moved to be able to share this art and the words below by @porknap, and do a humble amount of support to help make time-space for all who were touched by Tort’s life to engage in rituals of remembrance on January 18.

#StopCopCity #DefendTheWeelauneeForest
#ForestsNotFascism #CareNotCops
#MourningOurDead #MendingTheWorld

###

One year has passed since our beloved friend and comrade Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was murdered by Georgia State Police in the Weelaunee forest in Atlanta, GA.

We will gather in ritual resistance on January 18, 2024 @ 6 pm to share stories, songs, prayers, and feelings in remembrance of our dear sibling Tortuguita.

Bring words or non-words to share and altar items.

Mask up! Bundle Up!

We will convene at the grassy area off the French Broad River Greenway near the intersection of Craven/Riverside (in the River Arts District), Asheville, NC.

It should not be lost that the anniversary (or yahrzeit in jewish tradition) is happening the same month that 1 of the 61 defendants indicted with RICO charges will attend their trial, where they face bogus accusations of conspiring, racketeering, and inflicting domestic terr0r.

A bitter reminder to fight for our friends while they are still here (and that fighting for our friends who are not physically still here is tied up together, as prosecutors seek to use Tort’s diary as evidence in the trial)!

May their memory be a blessing.

From the forest to Atlanta to the United States to Palestine, hoping for an eternal shmita (sabbath year) for all occupied land.

@stopcopcity @defendatlantaforest @atlsolfund

🩷🌿🖤🐢🩷🌿🖤🐢🩷🌿🖤🐢

All anarchist(ic) spaces should routinely include grief altars.

So it lit a fire in me to see this one today at a @stopcopcity, @defendatlantaforest, and Palestinian solidarity afternoon of five workshops in so-called Asheville, NC, thanks to @12basketscafe lending its space and the @pansy.collective weaving it all together.

One candle on the altar burned for the whole seven hours, gently illuminating a banner behind it asserting that Palestine will be free. That flame seemed a carrier of the radical traditions, wisdoms, and solidarities in the room, and danced and flickered as if in tune with the joy and sorrow among us. The roses did what they do best: tend to broken hearts. Or as rebels have long said, “We need bread, but we also need roses!”

As we were all pitching in after the last workshop to clean up the space—where routinely, mutual aid breaks bread, as it were, through the community meals and so much else that happens there—I noticed the altar builder meticulously and reverently dismantling it. They gently picked up petals and leaves, and told me that they were going to set up the altar again at tonight’s fundraiser party.

If we can’t dance, it’s not our revolution. But if we can’t mourn and honor our dead, too, and remember that we only grieve what we love, and we love and fight for life and freedom fiercely and beautifully, then it’s not our revolution either.

#RebelliousMourning
#TryAnarchismForLife
#MourningOurDead
#FightingForTheLiving
#UntilAllAreFree

Tomorrow, at a Palestinian solidarity speak-out and march that many caring hands in so-called Asheville have been busily organizing for the past six days, we’ll set up our fourth public grief altar since October’s genocide began. They’ve all felt remarkably beautiful and painfully necessary—and not nearly enough to hold the tragedy and horror of so much loss.

But it feels impossible—if one has a heart—and disrespectful—if one has any humanity—not to mourn the dead as much and as often as we can, and as intimately bound up in our dogged resistance to the fascism that knows no boundaries.

Two essays, both mourner’s prayers in their own way, by two Palestinians and a Jew recently spoke to me. Both short pieces felt as if they’d be sacred offerings/gifts on or near our altars. So thanks to the design acumen of @beheldritualarts, they are now 4.25x5.5 zines, borrowing powerful illustrations from @erikruin, @wendyelisheva, and @land.of.sky.art.

Here’s a glimpse of each—via an extract and also my photo of the front and back covers of these zines, set on a grief altar of autumnal leaves.

From “Grief beyond Language by @nickikattoura and Nada Abuasi: “Language cannot communicate what the mind cannot process. Maybe we do not need to write. Maybe we weaponize our chants as eulogy, turn our marching into prayer, transform the streets into a funeral procession.”

From “Kaddish for the Soul of Judaism” by @agelender: “Can you hear me recite the Mourner’s Kaddish for every soul killed in Gaza? It may take me a moment, I have to say thousands of prayers, and each person has a name. I will sit Shiva for a million lifetimes. I leave a stone on each martyred grave to root the dead back into the earth, but I can still hear the screaming. … I want to turn back the clock.”

For downloadable imposed (print-ready) PDFs of these two, paired zines for your public and collective spaces of rebellious mourning and Palestinian solidarity actions, email me at cbmilstein (at) yahoo.

#MourningOurDead
#WeMustOutliveZionism
#WeMustOutliveFascism
#WeMustOutliveStates
#FightingForTheLiving
#UntilAllAreFree

#IslamophobiaKills
#AntisemitismKills
#MourningOurDead
#FightingLikeHellForTheLiving
#WeMustLoveAndProtectEachOther
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

art by Wendy Elisheva Somerson

Mourning our dead—who herself did so much to mourn via her music against the often-murderous violence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, fascism, and more—as seen wheatpasted in a bunch of public places around so-called Asheville, NC.

There’s such strength in this image, with eyes so intent on seeing and confronting hard truths, underscoring her own lyric, “I’m proud to be a troublemaker.” And yet there’s a sorrow to this image, to those eyes, that almost unwittingly makes one start replaying other lyrics of hers, tape-loop style, in one’s head: “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.”

Others have already said this, but it hits me every time I see this outdoor “altar” to Sinéad O’Connor / Shuhada’ Sadaqat: she, like other brave feminist truth tellers and healers, should have been honored in life, not relegated to a social death during life, nor had life made so hard and repeatedly abusive that death came too early.

May her memory spark a blessed revolution.

(photo: black-and-white headshot of Sinéad facing directly at the camera, with eyes wide open and no smile on her face, pasted on a buffed-gray, formerly graffitied wall)

#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#MourningOurDead
#MendingTheWorld

Grief rituals, one could argue, are part of the essential grounding for millennia-old cultures that orient toward far more ecological relations with the whole of this earth, including each other. For loss is part of the seasons of life, which ancient—and yet still here—cultures recognize needs to be honored through ceremony so as to remember what is loved and cherished, and continually reaffirm a duty to love and defend life.

It is little wonder that as colonialism and capitalism, heteropatriarchy and white Christian supremacy, grew into hegemonic death machines over the centuries, they tried to kill off innumerable life-giving rituals and ceremonies that humans passed along over generations to hold each other through transitions. They tried to make people forget that minds and bodies crave—and need—those rituals and ceremonies in order to sustain hearts and spirit. And without heart and spirit, humans become shells of themselves.

It is little wonder, then, that so many humans today, but especially human-made institutions like states and their police, are so hollowed out of heart—of empathy and sociability, solidarity and communal care—they all too easily acquiesce to or participate in killing off life.

It has been a week since Tortuguita was murdered in cold blood by cops within Weelaunee forest, where Tort gave full heart and loving spirit to defending life-giving ecosystems. May their memory be a blessing.

In that week, so many people have, in essence, “sat shiva,” a ritual within Jewishness that is about taking seven days to be with community (whether people or trees) to begin to honor and process loss of a beloved and grief at their death. Shiva doesn’t mean doing nothing. It is a time to sustain our hearts and spirits.

So it’s remarkable—a testament to Tort as well as the big, amorphous, autonomous, yet interwoven circles of rebels—that this past week has witnessed an outpouring of remembrance that we do indeed need and can revive ancient grief rituals, as precisely the ground that allows us to keep fighting, not merely to #StopCopCity, but to stop all systemic theft of lands and life.

#RebelliousMourning
#MourningOurDead
#FightingLikeHellForTheLiving
#RitualAsResistance
#MendingTheWorld

(photo: sign with words “Weelaunee People’s Park” seen among the trees in October 2022 at @defendATLforest)

Sunday afternoon #FuckThePolice (and their allies) stroll amid signs of fresh snowfall and the fresh fallout of what allegedly was a #StopCopCity vigil late last evening on the stolen Anishinabeeg lands of so-called Lansing, Michigan.

#MourningOurDead
#RestInPowerTort
#RebelliousMourning
#FightingLikeHellForTheLiving
#ForestsNotFascism
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

@defendATLforest
@stopcopcity
@AtlSolFund